Ruth Mace | |
---|---|
Born | London, England | 9 October 1961
Occupation | Anthropologist |
Title | Professor of evolutionary anthropology |
Spouse | Mark Pagel |
Children | 2 |
Academic background | |
Education | South Hampstead High School Westminster School |
Alma mater | Wadham College, Oxford |
Thesis | The dawn chorus: Behavioural organisation in the great tit (Parus major) (1987) |
Academic work | |
Discipline | Anthropology |
Sub-discipline | Evolutionary anthropology Phylogenetic approaches |
Institutions | Imperial College London University of East Anglia University College London |
Ruth Mace FBA (born 9 October 1961) is a British anthropologist,biologist,and academic. She specialises in the evolutionary ecology of human demography and life history,and phylogenetic approaches to culture and language evolution. Since 2004,she has been Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at University College London. [1] [2]
Mace was born on 9 October 1961 in London,England to David Mace and Angela Mace. She was educated at South Hampstead High School,an all-girls private school in South Hampstead,London,and at Westminster School,an independent school within the precincts of Westminster Abbey that has a mixed-sex sixth form. She studied zoology at Wadham College,Oxford,graduating with a Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree in 1983 and a Doctor of Philosophy (DPhil) degree in 1987. [1] Her doctoral thesis was titled "The dawn chorus:Behavioural organisation in the great tit (Parus major)". [3]
Having completed her doctorate,Mace began her academic career as a research fellow at Imperial College London;she held a NERC Postdoctoral Fellowship. [4] Then,from 1989 to 1991,she was a lecturer in the School of Development Studies at the University of East Anglia. [1] [4]
In 1991,Mace moved to the Department of Anthropology of University College London:she was a Royal Society University Research Fellow and Lecturer from 1991 to 1999,and Reader in Human Evolutionary Ecology from 1999 to 2004. [4] In 1994,having met Mark Pagel at University College,the two co-authored "The Comparative Method in Anthropology",that used phylogenetic methods to analyse human cultures,pioneering a new field of science —using evolutionary trees,or phylogenies,in anthropology,to explain human behaviour. [5]
In 2004,she was appointed Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology. [1] From 2005 to 2010,she was also Editor-in-Chief of Evolution and Human Behavior . [1] From 2018,she was the founding Editor-in-Chief of Evolutionary Human Sciences. [6] Since 2010,she has served as Head of Biological Anthropology at University College London. [4]
Mace's partner is Mark Pagel,professor of Evolutionary Biology at the University of Reading. Together they have two sons. [1]
In 2003,Mace gave the Curl Lecture,a prize lectureship of the Royal Anthropological Institute. [7] In 2008,she was elected a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA),the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and the social sciences. [8]
An evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS) is a strategy that is impermeable when adopted by a population in adaptation to a specific environment, that is to say it cannot be displaced by an alternative strategy which may be novel or initially rare. Introduced by John Maynard Smith and George R. Price in 1972/3, it is an important concept in behavioural ecology, evolutionary psychology, mathematical game theory and economics, with applications in other fields such as anthropology, philosophy and political science.
Biological anthropology, also known as physical anthropology, is a soft science or social science discipline concerned with the biological and behavioral aspects of human beings, their extinct hominin ancestors, and related non-human primates, particularly from an evolutionary perspective. This subfield of anthropology systematically studies human beings from a biological perspective.
Evolutionary anthropology, the interdisciplinary study of the evolution of human physiology and human behaviour and of the relation between hominids and non-hominid primates, builds on natural science and on social science. Various fields and disciplines of evolutionary anthropology include:
Robin Ian MacDonald Dunbar is a British biological anthropologist, evolutionary psychologist, and specialist in primate behaviour. Dunbar is professor emeritus of evolutionary psychology of the Social and Evolutionary Neuroscience Research Group in the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford. He is best known for formulating Dunbar's number, a measurement of the "cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships".
Richard D. Alexander was an American zoologist who was a professor at the University of Michigan and curator at the university's museum of zoology of in Ann Arbor, Michigan. His scientific pursuits integrated the fields of systematics, ecology, evolution, natural history and behavior. The salient organisms in his research are wide-ranging, from the orthopterans and Cicadidae (cicadas) to vertebrates: dogs, horses, and primates, including humans.
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